Namecheap
Phoenix data-centre cooling failure took hosting, DNS and email offline for over 30 hours
- Duration
- 30 hours 32 minutes
- Services affected
- Hosting, DNS, Email, Control panel, API
Scope. Namecheap reported the incident affected services across a customer base holding more than 24 million registered domains, alongside hundreds of thousands of hosted sites and around 1.4 million private email inboxes. More than 5,000 servers were taken offline.
Cause. Cooling at the Phoenix data centre housing core infrastructure failed after repeated utility power events during overnight storms, leaving several chillers unavailable as internal temperatures rose. Because the identity and control-plane systems that authenticate users, serve the API and route DNS were concentrated in that one facility, the impact was not limited to servers physically in Phoenix.
Resolution. Services were restored after 30 hours 32 minutes. Namecheap reported no data loss and said it would add redundancy across its US, European and Asian data centres.
Why it matters. Concentration risk, not weather. A single-site control plane means one building's cooling can take a global registrar's DNS with it — which is a design question every registrar should be asked, not a freak event.